Many print shops use a work flow depending on banners or banner pages. Banners are sheets of paper that are often positioned on top of a printed stack of pages. The banners have instructions regarding what to do with the stack. Operators read the banner and then move or process the stack as instructed. Some print shops use banners that are hand written on scrap paper, some others use computer printouts. There are many variations of the banner concept.
More advanced print shops use automatically generated banners. A document request submitted to the shop's document management system (DMS) results in a job ticket that contains or references a document description. A printing engine can use the document description to produce physical copies of the desired document. Custom programming causes the DMS to automatically generate a banner description that can be individually printed or that is prepended to the document description. Individually printed banners are hand placed onto a stack. Prepended banner descriptions result in the banner being printed as the first page of the stack.
FIG. 5, labeled as prior art, illustrates a document description 501 containing page description language (PDL) instructions for multiple pages. PostScript is a commonly used PDL that many printers can interpret. The printer accepts the document description 501 and then interprets the instructions for each page to generate the stack. The first page is printed by interpreting the page 1 PDL instructions 502. The second page is printed by interpreting the page 2 PDL instructions 503. The third page is printed by interpreting the page 3 PDL instructions 504. The fourth page is printed by interpreting the page 4 PDL instructions 505.
The document description 501 can also contain PDL instructions that affect every page. For example, the document description 501 can specify that every page is to be printed on certain size media having a particular finish.
The PDL used to describe documents is a rich language with many features. The features ease the handling, specification, and description of documents. Systems and methods for bringing the richness PDL features to banner descriptions without also damaging print shop work flows are needed.